SCOTT WALKER was the Sixties’ most sensitive pop heart-throb but he was managed by one of the toughest nuts in the business, Maurice King.

Anthony Reynolds, author of a new biography about the Walker Brothers, examines their strange relationship

Maurice King came to see me one night with a gun. He said: ‘You’re not gonna take my boy! I’ll shoot you!’ I said: ‘You’re not gonna shoot me or else you would have done already!’ ”

This is not an excerpt from the latest Guy Ritchie script; the man being threatened is Tony Calder, then business partner of Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham. The man with the gun is also in showbusiness.

The year is 1968 and Maurice King is the well-respected and deeply-feared manager of Britain’s biggest male pop star.

The “boy” is Scott Walker, ex-lead singer of the Walker Brothers, a group who in the summer of 1966 were bigger than the Beatles and Stones combined. Now a phenomenally successful solo singer and considered heir apparent to the Sinatra throne, there was a lot riding on Scott’s career and King didn’t want to lose out.

King’s behaviour shows just how much was at stake as between 1965 and 1969 the skinny, blond American with the booming baritone had topped both the uK album and singles charts again and again.

Scott Walker, sensitive, intellectual and introspective, was managed by a man whom many in the business regarded as a thug.

Walker referred to Maurice King as “Boris” as in “Karloff” or simply as “The Monster”.

When the Walker Brothers signed on to be managed in the summer of 1965, King was a partner in Capable Management, after making his first fortune on the northern supper-club circuit.

Capable was on the up and at the time of signing the Walkers, its other successful acts were Van Morrison and Shirley Bassey.

Extra income came via a share in the Starlite club, a sordidly glamorous fleapit frequented by celebrities and gangsters like the Krays.

By the mid-Sixties, Capable was hitting the top of its game in the legitimate world of showbusiness, yet King couldn’t resist keeping one custom-made brogue planted in the murky puddles of the underworld.

By the middle of 1965, the Walkers had begun their glorious ascent so few questioned King’s methods. Caught up in the rush of sudden huge success, the boys trusted their management implicitly, never questioning accounts, taxes or why their own managers were selling unlicensed posters and memorabilia outside Walker Brothers concerts and keeping all revenue from these bootlegs for themselves.

None of the Walkers even had a bank account. All revenue went directly to Capable, which paid the boys’ rent and a wage of £40 a week, a not inconsiderable sum then. June Clark, King’s secretary, remembers: “Maurice knew I could be trusted with his secrets in working with the band. Secrets they had to be, even from the boys, as he had ideas of his own about book-keeping and management.”

The success of the Walker Brothers came to an end in May 1967 when the band split and King took on Scott’s new career. “Maurice idolised Scott,” recalls Chrissie McCall, then the Walker Brothers’ fan club president, “to the point where he offered to build a new wing on the side of his house just for Scott so he could have his privacy.”

In 1968, Scott topped every “Best Male Singer” poll. His records sold millions and his TV show, This Is Scott Walker, trounced ITV rival The Tom Jones Show. More importantly, Scott was approaching a point of crystal clarity in his songwriting and was achieving huge commercial and critical success with his dark new material. Scott got away with cancelling a tour of South Africa because, on some level, King identified with the singer’s moral core but he still dreamt of managing his own Sinatra.

As for Scott, part of him still fed off showbusiness schlock, so for a moment he was able to maintain a balance that pleased all parties, with hits like Lights Of Cincinatti.

Yet a gulf between Scott and King slowly grew. Other managers were quick to notice, especially Loog Oldham and Calder, who saw something special in Scott, even if even they didn’t know how to handle him.

The choice ultimately was not theirs, as Calder points out. Scott’s manager, for once, had the law on his side: “Maurice King threatened us with violence then issued an injunction to prevent us interfering with his management contract.”

Such power games must have frayed Scott’s already fraught nerves, particularly at a time when he was beginning to find himself, both as a person and a writer. He was also pioneering the transition from teen heartthrob to serious album artist, so it’s unrealistic to suppose that such an old school wheeler-dealer as Maurice King would have been sympathetic to the emergence of such a rare butterfly.

The end for Scott and King came in the summer of 1969 when Scott was called up by the US Army to fight in the Vietnam War.

King assured the nervy Scott that he would “sort it” and after some clandestine phone calls, the two flew to New York, where King had arranged for false medical papers to be drawn up declaring Scott homosexual and consequently unfit for service.

In New York, the draft board dismissed Scott from potential service but soon King was approached by the lawyer who had orchestrated the deception and wanted payment. He refused to pay up, so the lawyer went to see Scott, who was unaware of what had gone on.

The furious lawyer headed back to King, who reluctantly paid up only when the lawyer threatened that he and Scott would not leave the US if he wasn’t paid. In doing so King lost much more than money. Scott was furious; Mary Arnold, King’s wife, recalled decades later: “When Scott found out about the money, it broke his heart. He lost his trust in Maurice.”

The pair had passed a point of no return; Scott needed his relationships to be built on mutual trust. King had not only breached this trust but also endangered Scott legally. On returning to Britain, Scott’s brooding temperament would not have been jollied up by the cabaret dates he was contracted to do that July. “I’m doing this concert because I have to do it but you know, it’s not me,” he said before the opening night.

With the cabaret farce behind him, he returned to London, followed his heart and sacked King, who was devastated. His wife Mary remembers: “Not even Maurice could talk his way out of that. His whole life was shattered. He had lost his prestige. He was never the same man after Scott left him.”

Now self-managed, despite King’s protests, legal and otherwise, Scott publicly announced that he would now be known by his real name of Scott Engel and immersed himself in the album that would come to be recognised as his masterpiece, Scott 4.

King would never reach such heights again and in his remaining years he slid deeper into the underworld. In the summer of 1977, Maurice King’s body was found in the flat above his offices with only an empty packet of sleeping pills and a drained bottle of Scotch for company.

The official cause of death was suicide. Yet even in death, King could be confounding. “I don’t think he committed suicide,” says his secretary June, who knew him as well as anyone. “I know others who knew him and we spoke about this. We laughed at the idea of it being a suicide. We think it was linked to his dark dealings. I’m not sure Maurice had a conscience like most of us.”

To order a copy of The Impossible Dream: The Story of Scott Walker and The Walker Brothers by Anthony Reynolds (Jawbone, £14.95), post-free (UK only), call 0871 988 8366 (calls cost 10p per minute from a BT landline), send a cheque or Po to The Express Bookshop, Po Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or order online at www.expressbookshop.co.uk